by Bobby Adair
“It’s a mile and a half to the jail from here,” said Tommy. “Let’s get as close as we can in the Razor. If we come across your people, you can peel off and join up with them.”
“I’m sticking with you.”
Tommy put a hand on Summer’s shoulder and looked her in the eye. “What I’m going to do here is dangerous. It might get me killed. I have to do it. You don’t.”
“We’re at war, Tommy. Whatever I do is going to be dangerous.”
“You and your people should get out of this. Spring Creek isn’t worth fighting for. By this time tomorrow, it won’t even be here.”
“Tommy, it’s not a town we’re fighting for now. You should know that better than anybody.”
Tommy ran around and got into the car. “Truth, justice, and the American way?”
“Sarcasm, Really?” Summer cut the wheels hard and spun the tires as she did a U-turn to make for the road into town.
Chapter 26
The night sky disappeared behind a curtain of smoke glowing orange from the fires beneath. A red-gold snow of embers swirled through the air currents flowing off the mountains, falling onto the town. Cars raced up the side streets, heading for the main road. Gunshots cracked, ominously near. A dozen people—not one of them a fireman—sprayed a garden hose on a house half-consumed in a blaze. More gawked. A woman sat in the yard, bawling as she watched the flames destroy the heirlooms and knickknacks that defined her life.
Tommy and Summer were off the main road, heading for the war, when Summer slowed.
A woman stood in the street, frozen among a sprinkle of brass bullet casings, glowing in reflected firelight. Her stare was stuck on a long line of corpses lying with feet toward the sidewalk, hands behind their backs, bound with those damned plastic straps. Many looked like they could be kissing the asphalt except for the pools of blood. Some had fallen sideways with horrible exit wounds exploding from their faces.
There was no doubt, they’d all been executed.
“It’s like someone flipped the primal switch,” mumbled Summer, “and we turned into animals.”
“We were always animals,” said Tommy.
Summer sniffled up tears that threatened to pour. “I refuse to believe that.”
“There were always beasts among us,” Tommy told her. “And now they’re off the chain.”
“Is that what you are, Tommy? A beast?”
“The worst kind, maybe.”
“I don’t believe that, either.”
"The most dangerous kind, then. You’ll see soon enough."
Summer slowed the Razor and pointed down the street. “Are you seeing this?”
Four blocks ahead, Tommy saw muzzle flashes. Shooters in camo jackets were ducking behind cars and standing behind dumpsters doing their best not to get themselves killed. “704,” said Tommy.
The air seemed to crack around the Razor, a sound Tommy hadn’t noticed for all the gunshots echoing through town. “We’re in the line of fire here.”
“They’re shooting the other way.” Summer was already pulling off the road.
“It’s coming from whoever is shooting at them. You hear those snaps in the air?”
“Bullets?” asked Summer.
Tommy nodded.
She gunned the engine and skidded into an empty dirt lot some of the locals used for parking when they had to pull a shift at one of the downtown souvenir shops. “Oh, shit!”
Tommy saw a body lying in the gravel, a 704. “Don’t worry, he’s dead.”
Summer parked the Razor, killed the engine, and unbuckled her harness.
Tommy was already climbing out. “If we can get past those knuckleheads, we can work our way past the last few blocks and reach the jailhouse.”
As Summer climbed out of the side-by-side, she peered through a gap between the buildings. “I parked here and went to that Starbucks on Thursday. Chad was in there, then, nose glued to his screen, probably chatting online to the other assholes who were planning all of this.”
Tommy checked the body for a sat-phone and noticed the dead guy had nothing on him—no rifle, no ammo, and certainly no sat-phone. That meant the people who killed him, good guys in Tommy’s book, might still be around.
Tommy jumped to his feet. "With those 704s busy shooting in the other direction, it wouldn't take much effort to get in close enough to finish them off.” Movement in the dark between the buildings caught Tommy's eye, and he peered down the alley. The coffee shop across the street—the one where Summer had seen now-deceased Chad—stood there dark and quiet. Two large holes were blasted through the sign. The windows in front were shattered. He didn’t see any people, though.
“We have them flanked,” said Summer. “I say we take them out.”
Tommy agreed with a nod, and sprinted to the back corner of a building on the border of the dirt parking lot.
Summer ran along beside him, stopped against the brick wall, and peeked around the corner.
Tommy looked, too, careful not to expose himself.
“I see,” Summer paused as she counted, “six. I think—”
“Freeze, motherfuckers!” A rifle barrel poked into Tommy's shoulder from behind.
***
“Drop your weapons and get on the ground,” the gruff voice commanded.
Footsteps shuffled from all sides as a group of armed men began to surround them. Tommy felt rage begin to bubble up inside. He looked at Summer, knowing she saw the determination in his face. He’d already been captured and held prisoner by a bunch of 704s once, he wasn’t about to let it happen again. He was going down shooting.
Tense, and careful not to move his arms, Tommy slowly turned his head. He needed to see who to shoot first.
“Summer Corrigan?” The gruff voice suddenly asked.
Summer’s head whipped around. The confusion on her face melted into a smile and she relaxed. “Gordon Hewitt?”
“I figured they had you for sure,” said Gordon, as another man told Tommy to relax, everything was cool.
Tommy’s tension slipped away with a breath he’d been holding. For a moment, he was sure it was all over for him. He’d been ready to die swinging his fists and blasting everything that tried to touch him until he couldn’t anymore. Instead, he slowly turned to face his ambushers. Cocking his head toward the group of 704s up the street, he asked, “You after them, too?”
Speaking to Summer, Gordon said, “Assholes kidnapped Angela.”
Summer pointed at Tommy. “His wife and daughter, too.”
Tommy sized up Gordon. He stood over six feet, with thick shoulders and a wrestler’s gut. He looked strong. Then it struck Tommy about the name. “Angela Hewitt?”
“Yeah?” Gordon turned suspicious eyes on Tommy.
“She goes to school with Emma, my daughter.”
“Emma Joss?” asked Gordon. “You’re her dad?”
Tommy nodded.
“I didn’t think you were real,” said Gordon.
“Do you know where Angela is?” asked Tommy.
Gordon nodded toward the body of the 704 lying in the gravel near the Razor. “He couldn’t tell me, so no.”
"She's in the county jail with Emma," Tommy told him. "All the cops who haven't turned traitor are locked up there, too."
“How do you know that?” asked Gordon, suspicious again.
Summer gave Gordon and his handful of men a summary that included their interrogation of Chad and their access to his computer and all the information on Battalion 704. That broke the ice. They all believed they were on the same side.
Introductions were quickly made, handshakes exchanged.
Tommy looked over the hunting rifles and shotguns the five men carried. Not one of them seemed to have any more ammunition than fit in the rifle or was stuffed in his pockets. Gordon had a cheap toy walkie-talkie attached to his hip. They were small-town guys, not trained, but itching for a fight with men who dramatically outgunned them.
Summer glanced back at the Razor. Tomm
y understood her unspoken approval. To Gordon, he said, “We’ve got three AR-15s, and an AK-47, in the back of the Razor. We have maybe sixty rounds of ammo for the AK but all you can carry for the AR-15s.”
That brought grins to the men’s faces.
“Quite fortuitous for us running into you two,” said Gordon.
“You guys load up,” Tommy told them, looking at Gordon and silently bonding over their common problem. “We need to kill these assholes while they’re still easy targets. Then we’ve got a jail to crack open.”
***
Tommy and Summer waited behind a dumpster, rifles at the ready, targets picked out. One of Gordon’s guys was hiding across the street with his hunting rifle sighted in on a 704 who was actively firing his weapon in the other direction.
At the corner of the next block over, Gordon and his other men, all armed with the assault weapons Tommy had stolen from Lugenbuhl's house, were ready to go. They were positioned behind cars and at the corners of buildings, targets lined up.
Gordon alone wasn’t crouched, waiting to shoot. He stood a few paces out in the cross street where Tommy, Summer, and the others could see him, but the 704s couldn’t. Gordon raised his arm, holding his cigarette lighter high. And, then he lit it.
That was the signal.
“One Mississippi,” counted Summer. “Two Mississippi.”
Tommy scoped out two more targets, and then looked down the barrel of his M4, ready to kill a woman barricaded on a balcony across the street and down at the far corner, sniping with a long hunting rifle in the other direction.
Summer came to the end of the count. “Five Mississippi.”
Tommy fired, as six more rifles blasted.
The woman on the balcony slumped. Tommy searched for his second target, a man who had just turned to his right to stare at a comrade dropped by Summer's first shot. Tommy put a bullet through his chest, and he dropped like he was dead.
The 704 defense fell apart as one after another realized they were taking fire not only from the front, but from somewhere else. And they ran, mostly down the block, right at Tommy, Summer, and Gordon’s man.
Tommy fired rapidly, but took enough time to line up each shot. Summer spent her rounds in a frantic blaze. The guy with the bolt-action hunting rifle did the best he could to keep up, but when he pulled the trigger, he almost always hit a target.
"They're heading into that building!" Tommy shouted, swapping his empty magazine and firing several rounds into the black shadows of a back door left open by three militants who'd just run inside. They were the last three alive on the block.
Tommy turned to their man across the street and yelled, "Go tell Gordon we're going after those guys!" To Summer, he said, "C'mon!" He stepped out from behind the dumpster, never doubting she'd be right behind him, and sprinted up the street.
Throwing his back against a century-old brick wall, Tommy stopped beside the open door and listened.
Summer was beside him in a second, panting from the run. “Are we going in?”
Tommy nodded. “Stay behind me. Keep your gun pointed anywhere but at me.”
“Barry had us practice urban warfare.” Summer told Tommy confidently.
Gordon came running up an alley with a guy named Roy behind him. He spotted Tommy and Summer and jogged toward them.
Tommy didn’t want to waste more time outside, more time for the three militants inside to spend putting themselves into an ambush position. He needed to go while they were still panicked and trying to catch their breaths. Tommy pointed through the door, spun through with his rifle up, and said, “Go!”
***
The three-story building was being renovated, and had been under construction for more than a year. The bottom floor, what Tommy could see through the dim light flowing in through the glass storefront at the other end of the building, had been a pub. Mostly it had been gutted. A long bar draped with protective drop cloths stretched down one wall. A narrow staircase ran up the wall behind the bar. Two pool tables stood in the middle of the floor and looked to have been left right where they were sitting when the renovation work had started. Tommy didn’t see anything moving in the shadows on the first floor, and didn’t see any oddly-shaped shadow that could be a combatant.
He heard the sound of heavy feet clomping above.
Tommy pointed up the stairs and told Summer, "Follow as fast and as quiet as you can."
Up the stairs he went, taking them one at a time, moving his feet fast and light, trying to plant his footfalls near the edges, where he guessed the boards would be better supported and less likely to creak. Because the ceiling on the bottom floor stood fifteen feet high, the long staircase—probably built when the building was originally constructed—was long, narrow, and daunting.
On the next floor up, Tommy saw the exterior walls had all been stripped to bare brick. The interior walls were gone, and the ceiling was ripped away, nothing overhead but the joists and the floor of the room above.
Near the top of the stairs, Tommy peeked over the lip of the floor for a look at the entire space. Except for wires hanging from the walls and half-finished ductwork dangling from the ceiling, the entire second story was empty. Through a back door and the small windows on the rear wall, past an exterior deck and stairs that might pass for a fire escape, Tommy saw the flames covering the mountain. Through the rows of windows across the front and side the building, Spring Creek looked alive in destructive chaos.
Summer came up beside him. “One more?”
Tommy hurried up the last of the stairs and ran toward the back of the building, where the staircase to the next floor ran up the wall, just as the stairs had from the floor below. Pausing again, Tommy listened.
“What?” Summer whispered.
“It’s quiet,” Tommy answered. “They’re not moving.” He suspected the three had set up on the floor above. “As fast as you can, go back down the stairs and get Gordon. Then make all the noise you can when you come back up. ”
“What will you do?”
Tommy pointed to the back door and the fire escape outside. "When you guys distract them, I'll hit them from behind. Now, fast, before they realize they need to cover the back door."
“What if they already are?”
“Then things won’t go as well.” Tommy ran for the rear exit.
Summer clomped down the stairs.
In moments, Tommy was outside again with an unobstructed view of the mountain just west of town. Half of it was burning. Smoke was filling the sky and stinging his eyes.
He crept up the exterior stairs.
It took only moments to make his way to the third floor. Inside, it looked as barren as the second. In the light coming in through the windows, Tommy spotted the silhouettes of three figures using vertical support columns for cover. They were arrayed in a row to flank anyone coming up the stairs to the third floor. None of them were looking toward the back of the building.
Tommy moved to the far end of the deck and edged past a railing to where he was able to see through a window. The three ambushers were still in their places, completely distracted by the noise Summer and Gordon were making as they rushed up the stairs.
Tommy raised his rifle and aimed it at the first in line. He'd barely have to shift his aim to hit the other two. He flicked his fire mode selector to semi to get a three-round burst with each pull of the trigger. His farthest target wasn't more than sixty feet away. Still, he took a breath and steadied his aim to make sure he wouldn't miss.
The closest guy, maybe sensing something, turned to his left.
Tommy fired three fast bursts. The window shattered, and all three men fell.
He rushed in through the door.
“Tommy?” called Summer from the stairs below.
“Hold,” Tommy called back as he crossed the floor, keeping his rifle trained on the downed men. The first one he came to was dead. The second was still breathing, and Tommy brought that to an end. The last had a shoulder wound and a shatter
ed arm. He was trying to move his left hand to his weapon when Tommy ended his life. “Clear.”
***
On the roof, four floors up, Tommy was able to see all of Spring Creek, from the shore of the lake eight blocks to the east all the way to the mountain burning on the west side of town. And the houses aflame among the trees at the foot of the mountain. He saw the hospital where the valley curved away to the south, and he could see north past the highway to the golf course community where his house stood among the lights twinkling up there in the dark. If the fire jumped over the gap between the mountains that I-70 ran through, his house would be going up in flames, too.
On the highway leading out of town, red taillights streamed both north and south. Wails and gunshots punctuated the night, and sirens screamed over everything.
“Is this what Hell looks like?” Summer was beside Tommy, looking across the city, too.
“Who needs Hell,” asked Gordon, “if we have this here?”
Tommy turned his attention to the county jail, three blocks down. From his vantage, he had little doubt the fire would soon be rolling over Spring Creek, from the mountain all the way to the lake. Come morning, he expected to see nothing left but brick walls, concrete pillars, and ash.
Gordon nodded at the approaching fire. “We need to get a move on if we want to take the jail before that gets here.”
The radio on his hip crackled. He pulled it up and pressed the toggle on the side. “Yeah?”
A fuzzy voice answered back. “Most of us are downstairs. We’ve secured the perimeter. The rest are heading this way.”
“Alright,” Gordon answered. “We’ll be down shortly.”
Tommy looked at Gordon with a dozen questions painted on his face. The first, he asked, “How many people do you have?”
“I’ve got about twenty with me I know are solid,” answered Gordon. “Another forty or thereabouts are tagalongs. They’re missing people, too. They were the ones keeping those 704s busy when we hooked up with you two. We were moving around to flank them.”